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Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Pictures of the Wooden Churches of Maramures, Translyvanis

Pictures, images & photos of Maramures, Northern Transylvania, Romania. Maramureș is a region in north eastern Romania hemmed in by the Ukraine border to the north and mountains to the south, west & east that are inaccessible in the winter. Many of the valleys within Maramures have small villages with wooden houses & churches that are linked together by dirt roads as they have been for millennia.

The Maramures is a remote and atmospheric area with villages that modernity still has not reached, The horse & cart is still the main form of transport and families go daily to their fields with scythes to cut hay to keep their animal alive through extremely cold winters.

The remoteness of Maramures has created a community that sits between the Orthodox Christianity of the East & The Roman Church of the West. Add to this the underlying pagan traditions that have survived in such a remote area and you are left with a rich folk and religious art that has a place for all the beliefs. Wooden churches are a political statement of independent beliefs as the Austro Hungarian rulers allowed only Roman Catholic Churches to be built out of stone. As the people of Maramures are predominately Orthodox, Greco Catholics or Uniate, this meant that they could only build what were seen as temporary churches out of wood. Today over 150 survive in various states of repair and the best 8 are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

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About Paul Williams

Award winning food & travel photographer and film director Paul Williams based in London and North Yorks Moors. Photography and film credits as range from projects for Dire Straits and The Zombies to Tesco. Paul Williams is terminally addicted to creating images. see at